Tag Archives: politics

href weekly | Apr23-Apr29 2023

Bits

a cassette player with added pitch/speed control, delay and echo, a light sensor to change volume with, and the option to record from an audio input or the built-in microphone. https://lara-grant.com/portfolio/rachels-cassette-player-mod/

031 Tiny SciFi Stories

“We’ve seen demonstrably, intellectually, that word processing is a good thing for everybody. Now let’s admit it in our heart of hearts we may not exactly be crazy about changing over to it but probably the best course of action is to learn how to use it anyway.” https://youtu.be/9rAu23esnQc

Today, most people take it for granted that the Web, and indeed the Internet it is built on, is, by its nature, anti-contextual and devoid of provenance. We assume that decontextualization is intrinsic to the very idea of a digital network. https://archive.ph/e6w5m

This is a Social Network for .. No humans allowed https://chirper.ai/

There is no blockchain. No proprietary social sign-in. No “real-name policy” No distributed hash table, onion routing, raft consensus, or peer-to-peer protocol. There is just a method of providing simple digitally signed text, and a simple, scalable search service. https://wiki.wellorder.net/post/nostr-intro/

He was very, very good at liberating other people through his example. He was not good at liberating himself. https://archive.ph/8Uiv0

117 Tiny SciFiStories

a $1200 (USD) microphone https://teenage.engineering/store/cm-15

Politics & Economics

Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is launching a new campaign today, titled Books UnBanned, to help teens combat the negative impact of increased and book bans in across the country. For a limited time, young adults ages 13 to 21 nationwide, will be able to apply for a free eCard from BPL, unlocking access to the library’s extensive collection of eBooks. https://www.bklynlibrary.org/media/press/brooklyn-public-library-94

The thing that scares me is that we don’t fall for them, or most of us don’t fall for them, but they just continuously pop up one by one over time. And we’re constantly fighting over whether or not we believe in the latest instance of media .. that cumulative effect over time of lots of little instances of that, and some big ones too, eventually to build up to the point where we stop trusting media in general. https://thewalrus.ca/ai-and-politics-how-will-we-know-what-and-who-is-real/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp84sRpM1Js

The National Farmers Union (NFU) has submitted data to the House of Commons agriculture committee which details how much retail prices have risen compared to the prices that farmers receive for their goods. https://www.nfu.ca/gap-continues-to-widen-between-food-prices-that-consumers-pay-retailers-and-prices-farmers-receive/

href weekly | Apr9-Apr15 2023

Bits

Excellent background of a fully online conference run with platforms https://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2023/04/10/

Technologies change our collective sense of what’s possible and, in doing so, they change our sense of how things should be. https://aeon.co/essays/what-drum-machines-can-teach-us-about-artificial-intelligence

Sound & Music

Enjoyed a #roadtrip with a friend up the coast to catch an Adam Baldwin show in Liverpool https://youtu.be/Fxxi57jQWUM

Arts

The brilliant .. his illustrations and work were such a big part of my childhood and adolescence .. still have all my magazines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK6xE-9sdI

Four office co-workers live and work in downtown where virtually all the office buildings, malls and apartments are connected by a maze of glassed-in bridges. The friends have all staked a month’s salary on a bet to see who can stay indoors the longest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1cNFDzPt

WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation https://vimeo.com/ondemand/whaamblam

Politics & Economics

The analysis found that the 34 mines’ power use was causing nearly 16.4 million tons of carbon pollution each year.” https://archive.is/iWpoR

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/

have stored and cared for physical books for decades, and if readers are becoming more comfortable with online formats, why can’t a digitize the volumes it owns and loan the digital copies in lieu of the physical ones? https://archive.ph/Qnbq8

This would be the perfect time to fund what could easily be a self-sustaining that sets up and operates instances on behalf of journalism organizations that could verify their own journalists. That would solve a lot of problems, and restore (some) genuine independence to the craft .. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/04/journa

On March 28, the Canadian government’s budget announcement introduced a plan to implement a #righttorepair for electronic devices and home appliances in 2024 https://theconversation.com/giving-can

The truth of the matter, when it comes right down to it, is that most homeowners don’t want to be more affordable if it means the value of their property has to go down in the process, or that more people are going to move into their neighbourhood. And that, of course, is exactly what has to happen. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/04/13/opinion/we-are-all-blame-canada-brutal-housing-market

How a peripheral ideology becomes mainstream: Strategic performance, audience reaction, and news media amplification in the case of QAnon Twitter accounts … “future performance of group identity” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448221137324

The primary reason for our stalled progress on reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, and financial markets.” https://archive.ph/a569K